Tactile dots formed on substrates are used by blind and other visually impaired individuals to read, for object recognition, and the like. The tactile dots are arranged in pre-defined patterns to form tactilely recognizable characters or codes. An example of the use of tactile dots and tactile dot groups is Braille characters.
The ISO/IEC 7811-9 standard specifies the location and characteristics of a tactile identifier mark on plastic cards that are used by visually impaired individuals to distinguish their cards.
In the past, tactile dots on plastic cards were formed using embossing mechanisms that included multiple punch and die pair combinations which increases the size of the mechanism required to form all the possible characters of a 6 dot group. In addition, using multiple punch and die pairs can limit the spacing between adjacent dots to a pre-determined distance for each tactile dot group/character to be formed.